


MIA

by neversaydie



Series: Like Real People [8]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes Remembers, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Memory Related, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sam Wilson is Not A Cat Person, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Steve Rogers is So Young, Steve Rogers-centric, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-14
Updated: 2016-04-14
Packaged: 2018-06-02 06:15:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6554260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neversaydie/pseuds/neversaydie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He thinks about living, about taking a pottery class or volunteering or sitting on a beach and drinking something fruity that won't get him drunk, alone. No one cracking wise about Irish skin or getting handsy with sunscreen or complaining obnoxiously about sand in unmentionable places. He thinks about being on the beach, about the glaring absence of someone sitting habitually on his left because that used to be his working ear.</p><p>Steve could sit on a beach. He could. He thinks about it.</p><p>[Bucky is missing and Steve is looking for answers, following directly from My Soul to Take]</p>
            </blockquote>





	MIA

**Author's Note:**

> Direct sequel to [My Soul To Take](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5985709). Read that first as this is a bridge part between that and the next.

"I'm serious. You need to get this furball outta my house."

Sam, it turns out, is very much a dog person and has exactly zero time for cat nonsense. Which is unfortunate since he's been cat-sitting Jager for a month now.

"It's not for much longer." Steve runs a hand anxiously over his mouth and leans on the kitchen counter, phone pressed between his shoulder and his ear where he's trying to construct a sandwich that's calorie-heavy enough he doesn't have to stop working for a while. He's been taking advantage of Sam's good nature, he knows that, but the last thing he's been worrying about since Bucky disappeared is what the damn cat is doing. "I've got a lead in—"

"Steve, he said don't look for him."

"How can I not look for him? He took off because I—"

"He took off because he's batshit, man." Sam, apparently, has exactly zero time for Steve's nonsense either. "Nothing against the guy, but call a spade a spade."

"He's—"

"He's dealing however he needs to. He said he didn't want you to be around him, so maybe you should listen this time. That's what caused the whole problem, right?"

"But if—"

"Listen to your damn boyfriend and let him come back in his own time. He nearly killed me, you, and like half North America a couple of years ago, he can take care of himself. He'll be fine."

"He needs—"

"He needs you to respect his fucking choice and give him some time to get his shit together. You needed time to process once you thawed out, so does he. Let him figure out how his brain works. Because as far as coping skills, man, you're not exactly a shining beacon of mental health yourself. Log in your own eye, Rogers."

That shuts Steve up pretty effectively, because the last person who read him his rights like that was Bucky, back when getting his ass kicked over nothing was dangerous and not the reason half the nation thinks he's a hero. The other half think he's a fascist, apparently, which he finds pretty unfair considering he told Donald Trump to suck his cock on twitter last week and nearly caused a political incident. The spluttering, outraged fallout on Fox News was worth it, though.

"He's not my boyfriend." He says, lamely, after way too much silence has stretched between them, and Sam sighs, crackly and _so done_ over the line.

"Shut the fuck up, man. He's your boyfriend. Don't make me do counselling at you again, it's my day off and I've got better things to do than be your mystical guru about normal human behaviour." That's the end of that argument Steve didn't know he was having, then. "Come get this fucking cat."

"It's Bucky's cat." He pouts, maybe, just a little bit.

"Come get your boyfriend's cat, then." He can _feel_ Sam's eye roll from here. It should be illegal. "I sat on a _hairball_ , I'm not keeping this puking asshole one more day."

"I'll call Nat and see if she'll pick him up. I think she's in DC." Steve rubs a slightly unsteady hand over his face again with a grimace. And he thought Bucky was the one who shook, maybe Sam's not totally wrong about the coping thing. "I'm sorry, Sam. About the hairball. And dumping the cat on you. And being weird about Bucky. And… basically everything."

"I forgive you, bad calls happen. Now stop the self-punishing bullshit, fucking Catholic." Sam somehow manages to sound totally affectionate and totally exasperated at the same time, and it's just the tone Bucky used to take when Steve sloped home with a busted lip again. It makes his stomach twist to hear it now. "Get this cat outta my house and then go live for a while. Take a vacation, get laid, I don't care. Just stop thinking about whatever Bucky's doing."

Then Sam hangs up, and Steve is left with silence and guilt. So, the usual.

He texts Nat about Jager and then stands still in his too-sunny kitchen and thinks for a long time. He thinks about living, about taking a pottery class or volunteering or sitting on a beach and drinking something fruity that won't get him drunk, alone. No one cracking wise about Irish skin or getting handsy with sunscreen or complaining obnoxiously about sand in unmentionable places. He thinks about leaving Captain America behind, about just being Steve Rogers again as if he even knows who that is now. He thinks about being on the beach, about the glaring absence of someone sitting habitually on his left because that used to be his working ear.

Steve could sit on a beach. He could. He thinks about it.

Then he snaps out of it and boots up his laptop. Because he doesn't have to be looking for Bucky in order to be doing something to help the situation. Or satisfy his conscience, at least. Because he might not be able to undo his mistakes, but he can't just do nothing. That's not his style.

He never did tan, anyway.

 

Billy Donnelly is pretty spry for being almost a hundred years old. Still smoking like a chimney too, but so old that the nurses don't even try to make him go outside to meet health and safety standards because if he burns himself up then he was probably only losing a couple of months at the best. The clinical, bare room he's called home for the past four years is thick with blue smoke when Steve opens the door, more familiar than the cleaner modern air and yet alien at the same time.

Steve always gets the same look when nursing home staff recognise him. It's the same stung smile people used to pull when he was small and sickly and everyone but Bucky and his Ma was always slightly surprised he hadn't croaked yet. It makes him itchy and angry at the same time (Bucky gets aggressive about pity now, and Steve recognises that like he's looking in a mirror), so he always hopes he'll pass as a grandson and not someone whose friends are all either dying or dead.

Nobody recognises him this time, which is a relief considering he's not sure how this encounter is going to go.

"You bring my lunch or what? If there's green jello again I'm dying on the fuckin' spot."

The old man grumbles out the gripe he's clearly repeated hundreds of times, sitting in a high-backed chair with a checked blanket over his knees and an overflowing ashtray balanced precariously on a flimsy folding table to his right. There's a beat of silence as he squints up at Steve through his bottle-thick glasses and recognition slowly dawns. Steve can't say the same happens for him, because there's nothing to connect the kid he knew to the geriatric in front of him but the reddish tint of his eyebrows and his thick Brooklyn accent.

It makes him feel slightly sick to meet people he used to know now, like he's looking in a funhouse mirror or trapped in a sinking tar nightmare that he can't wake up from. Sometimes he dreams that if he can just do enough to atone, if he can just be _good_ , then somehow he'll wake up and be back home and this will all have been some ridiculous fever dream conjured up by reading one of Bucky's science fiction comics too close to sleeping. The vertigo feeling of seeing young faces melt to old isn't something he'd ever read about back then, but there's still a tiny part of him that clings desperately to the hope that this isn't real.

Maybe that's why he'd been so certain in dismissing Bucky's memory as a dream, because accepting reality is something he's been staunchly avoiding since he woke up enough that it's become habit by now. Denial was about all he had left, at least until he got Bucky back and denial stole him too.

"Rogers? Holy cow, I heard about you coming back from the dead. Blowing up aliens and half of goddamn Manhattan." Billy rasps, caught somewhere between awe and envy, and Steve just stares and stares without saying a word. "Last I saw you were moving outta the neighbourhood when your Ma passed, God rest her. Couldn't believe it when I heard you were shipping out. I thought to myself, I thought they've gotta be scraping the fuckin' barrel if they're taking the runts of the—"

"I need to talk to you, Billy." Steve breaks into the rambling because he can't hear about the 'old days' when yesterday makes his bones tight enough to break. White knuckles are clenching so hard at his sides that he's not sure he hasn't cut crescent moons of restraint into his palms, and it's barely grounding the way he'd like it to be. "It's about Bucky Barnes."

Billy doesn't even blink, which probably isn't a good sign for Bucky's memory. Surely if the guy was some kind of rapist then he'd at least react, although Steve is starting to suspect that things being that cut and dry is a naïve hope on his part. Maybe he's been totally naïve about a lot of shit since he woke up, but being treated like some kind of fossilised icon when he's only twenty-seven and still feels like he doesn't know shit for sure makes a stubborn part of him feel like a certain amount of his naivety is his right.

Maybe it shouldn't have been such a blow to find out that not all bad guys wore uniforms to distinguish them from good people, but it's still something Steve only learned relatively recently. Still something he struggles with sometimes.

He's not the old man sitting in the chair in front of him, he's still so young and he has no idea how to deal with the massive trauma his boyfriend (apparently, thanks Sam) has gone through. He hasn't lived that life, he hasn't grown that way. Like a vine on a wall, he's only been able to follow the path laid out for him. He's done blood and mud and he can make a pretty speech, but give him something complex that demands emotional maturity and he'll still stutter and get tongue-tied and regret everything he ever said afterwards.

That's how he feels now, mulishly trying to kick his way through to the facts of this issue because it might give him some idea of how to proceed. With Bucky gone and his actions a part-cause he feels adrift, and he's grasping for solid ground even if it turns out to be worse than drowning.  

"Barnes?" Billy snorts derisively. "Fella followed you around like some kinda lovesick puppy. Wasn't surprised he got drafted, d'you remember track and field when Sister Catherine—"

"I need to know if you remember something that happened between you and Bucky." Steve cuts him off again, because nostalgia is exactly what he doesn't fucking need right now. He tries to breathe out the impatience buzzing under his skin, because this man doesn't _need_ to tell him anything and he desperately needs to hear the truth.

"Between me and Barnes?" The old man squints again and Steve has to see him as an _old man_ and not _Billy_ (Big Billy, big bully, shook Steve upside down for the pennies in his pocket once and it was the only time Bucky made him leave it instead of getting his money back because even _he_ couldn't knock Big Billy down) otherwise he might break something. "Plenty happened, you gotta be specific. There was that time he took Mary McDonagh home after I spent all night buttering her up at—"

"When we were kids, Billy. Something you and Bucky did together." Steve feels like he's going to vibrate right out of his skin if he's not careful. It happens since the serum, his metabolism is on overdrive all the time so he'll shake and fidget and have to go and run around for a while if he tries to stay still for too long. But that horrible strangeness in his own body isn't what this is. This is the anxiety of not knowing which answer he needs and which one he wants. "Something you did to him."

"Something I did?" Billy frowns, leathery face creasing up in confusion. "Now, lemme see. I ratted him out to our boss about his grandma not dying when—"

"Did you and Bucky ever have sex?" It's a struggle to not grab the old man by the throat and force him to stay on track, and Steve is starting to feel those tremors under his skin again as he blurts the question right out. Some shade of propriety (of being _Cap_ , and isn't he sick of being told how to greet dignitaries and politicians and smile and put on his dress uniform and smile for a camera over and over) makes him want to be more discreet with his wording, but he's got no interest in hidden things staying hidden after SHIELD and HYDRA and the Winter Soldier and _all of it_.

This whole thing, Bucky taking off and home crashing into now like skeletons into the light, feels like the final straw. Steve's spine is curving just like it used to and he's _done_ with the weight he never asked for.

"Sex? Guys can't do that." Billy makes a face and then slides his eyes away from Steve's like he's embarrassed. He's clearly too old to have much of a filter or he'd clam up completely, and Steve's not sure whether he's grateful for that or really, really not. "You know what it's like, you're kids, sometimes you tug each other off or whatever. Curiosity, y'know? It's not like a coupla queers—"

"So you did. That. With Bucky." Steve has no idea what his brain is doing aside from sending a crawling, creeping numbness over his nerves, the slow-motion impact of terrible news, of not being able to close his eyes and turn away.

"Why the hell d'you wanna know about _Barnes_ , anyway? Plenty of guys—"

"Did he want it? What you did?"

"It's not like you could just come out and admit you wanted it, you know what it's like with girls. Gotta put up a token fight so they don't look like a whore when they let you—"

The rambling dies away then, or at least Steve doesn't hear it anymore. The heartbeat in his ears drowns out the creaky old voice and the ambient noise of someone crying faintly down the hall. The bland room narrows down to the smell of smoke and the sickening drop in his gut.

_NOT A DREAM_

"You son of a bitch." He starts towards the chair and grabs Billy by the collar of his worn shirt. It's only the flinch he inspires that makes Steve stop, forces him to back off again because this isn't Big Billy anymore, this is an extremely old man who probably hasn't even spared Bucky Barnes a thought for half a century at least. He drops his hands to his sides again, impotent and so angry he might burst open and splatter all over the walls because he doesn't know what to fucking _do_.

"Where the hell's my nurse?" Billy doesn't look scared anymore, the shock of being grabbed making him blink up at Steve through those thick glasses like he's never seen him before. "Did you bring my lunch? If there's green jello again I'm dying on the fuckin' spot."

"I hope you do." That's all Steve can force out, mouth suddenly as dry as the sand of the beach he can never sit on because the one still-living person he loves won't be there. Because he tried to tell Steve about what Billy did and Steve wrote him off like he was just as senile as the old man chain-smoking in the chair in front of him because he couldn't _deal_.

The next thing he knows he's sitting on a bench outside the nursing home, cold drizzle dripping off his hair and sliding down under his collar to jolt him out of the trance he's in. For a horrible, seasick moment he thinks he must have hurt Billy, might have killed him, since the last thing he remembers is blinding hatred and self-loathing and the urge to wrap his hands around that leathery neck and use all his hideous strength to _squeeze_ —

There's no blood on his hands. He checks five times and scrubs them together in the damp air just for good measure, but they're clean. He must have just wanted to hurt Billy, not actually followed through with it. He wouldn't do that, surely. He wouldn't murder an old man in cold blood even if he'd tainted the one time in Bucky's life that had resembled something like innocence. Surely he wouldn't, not even if he wanted to with every fibre of his stupid, hulking being.

A surge of nausea overtakes him and Steve lurches forward, retching emptily between his knees before gulping in heavy lungfuls of air and swallowing it all back down. He can see the sky-blue blur of a nurse approaching him out of the corner of one watery eye, so he forces himself to his feet and walks briskly in the opposite direction out of the grounds, tugging his hood up over his head just in case he's recognised. Stricken, reeling, Steve doesn't know how to put on his Cap face and be polite and socially appropriate right now.

Running away is the best he can do.

He stops a few blocks away and lets his head thunk against an alley wall hard enough to leave brick dust in his hair and stars behind his eyes. He thinks he understands why Bucky took off now, because right now he wants to run and run and not _deal with_ this shit that feels too heavy and too hard and _too much_ for him. He's had the world on his shoulders since the moment Erskine asked him _Do you want to kill Nazis?_ and now Steve is just _tired_. He wants Bucky and he wants to go home and he wants _out_.

It's not a decision, not consciously, but Steve yanks his hood up again and walks out of the alleyway with a new purpose in mind, ducking his head to avoid the cameras Bucky taught him to spot. He leaves his bike, because they can track that, and texts Natasha one of the failsafes she'd given him way back after they first became friends and she'd told him it was reassuring to be a ghost. She'll stop his cards being traced, he trusts her with that unquestioningly. Maybe instead of finding Bucky he should try and lose something. It's not like there's anything he wants to go back to at the Tower, not when his floor is empty and his dress uniform is hanging neatly pressed in his closet.

Steve Rogers walks into Penn Station that afternoon, and Captain America disappears.


End file.
